Tom Cruise continues to do the impossible when it comes to movie stunts. He’s not afraid to push his body to the limit to get a shot, and while filming Mission: Impossible — Fallout, he even broke his ankle while performing a stunt that involved leaping from one building to another and taking off running.
Fallout involved another stunt that was even riskier: a HALO jump, something he’d been wanting to do for years and in doing so, becomes the first actor to capture on camera. A HALO jump is described as a high-altitude, low opening jump in which the parachutist opens his chute only once closer to the ground than to the object he’s jumping from. Said jumps usually take place at 25,000 feet, which is high enough to induce hypoxia.
Released by Paramount Pictures, the video details the novelty of the scene as well as the risks. To get the shot, Cruise inhaled pure oxygen for 20 minutes on the ground to avoid decompression sickness and then threw himself out of a plane at 25,000 feet. To make things more challenging, the filmmakers only had one chance a day to get the shot because it was a nighttime sequence, filmed as close to sunset as possible.
Mission: Impossible — Fallout is the sixth entry in the “Mission: Impossible” franchise and it is directed by Christopher McQuarrie. Michelle Monaghan, Rebecca Ferguson, Henry Cavill, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Alec Baldwin, Angela Bassett, Wes Bentley, and Vanessa Kirby co-star in the film, which Paramount will release on July 27.
